


Unhandled Exceptions

by AliceInKinkland



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s05e12 .exe, F/F, Gen, Minor Character Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, brief mentions of fwb Shaw/Cole
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-03-26 16:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13861563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceInKinkland/pseuds/AliceInKinkland
Summary: The Machine was never built. Samaritan is the only AI watching the world every hour of every day, and Root is its top agent, a true believer in its vision. But when a strange mission plants a seed of doubt in her mind, she finds herself with questions she never thought she'd ask.ISA agent Sameen Shaw is good at what she does. But when her partner begins poking his nose into things best left alone, she finds her job—and her life—on the line.





	1. Premonition

The clock on the bedside table of the anonymous hotel room blinks 4:23am, the red glow making Root’s temples pound. She rolls onto her back, forces herself to close her eyes, shifts on the hard mattress.

She used to take sleeping pills sometimes, before she found Samaritan, before she was part of anything bigger than herself. But Samaritan doesn’t like things like that. It can’t afford to risk waking an asset in the event of an emergency only to find them groggy and disoriented. Roots gets it. Tonight, though, she misses the way the pills used to put her brain on standby for a while, the way she would wake up like she was being rebooted, humming back to life like a cat or a generator.

She adjusts her earpiece, makes sure it’s on. It’s strange to wear it to bed, she knows; her phone will alert her if she’s needed. But on nights like these she doesn’t like to take it out. Some nights she wakes up again and again, and each time she touches her hand to her ear, checks that she still has her connection.

She stretches out her arms on either side of her as though reaching for something she can’t name, something smooth and warm and absent. The bed is too big for her small, solitary body. “I can’t sleep,” she says to the empty room.

After a moment, drawn-out like a fall, Samaritan is in her ear, finally, blessedly. Tonight, It’s decided on a breathing exercise: inhale, hold, exhale. Root grits her teeth. It’s some pre-recorded meditation track, cheesy and impersonal. She was hoping for It’s voice, for whispered secrets of her fellow hotel occupants, or statistics, probabilities, a tale of the likely future spun out before her in quantifiable chunks. She feels needy, petulant, hot and shivering all at once.

But she closes her eyes, and breathes, and trusts, and tries to sink into sleep.

* * *

Root places her hand to a palm scanner and pushes open the innocuous-looking but heavily-secured door to the headquarters of Decima Technologies. Greer is waiting for her, his handshake over-firm as though he still thinks it might intimidate her.

Root hopes Greer feels terror whenever he remembers the time she tried to kill him, back when they had both found Samaritan. She hopes he thinks about how she would have succeeded, too, if Samaritan hadn’t stayed the execution, if It hadn’t wanted the two of them working together. Greer in charge, Root in the field. That had been a bitter pill to swallow.

Power plays become complicated when God is involved.

“I trust our friend the senator is no longer a roadblock to Samaritan’s success?” Greer asks her as they walk towards his office for Root’s briefing.

“He’s taken care of,” says Root absently. It was an unmemorable kill. There’s no reason she should have slept so badly last night.

“And how was your trip back from DC?”

Root shoots Greer her most obviously insincere smile. “Fine, thank you. Your message this morning said something about another mission?”

Greer’s social niceties are one of the many reasons Root has never felt much besides disdain for him. Greer does not care about Root—in fact he actively dislikes her—and yet he plays this game every time he sees her, asking after her well-being, just like every other inconsequential person on the planet. Samaritan is built for a greater degree of truth, bright and unforgiving, than Greer is capable of, no matter his transhumanist posturings. Root wants to watch him bleed, and she allows herself a moment to indulge the fantasy as she holds the door to the office open to him.

Greer begins the briefing with a curt nod at the chair across from his desk. Root stays standing, resting her hands on the back of the chair and affecting a stance that is just a bit wider than necessary.

“Have you ever heard of Arthur Claypool, Miss Groves?” he says, steepling his fingers like a cartoon villain. Root imagines cutting them off one by one.

“He brought Samaritan to life,” she says smoothly. The name sends her back to the period where she was furiously hacking Pentagon servers, pulling up scraps, half convinced she was just another conspiracy theorist, destined to waste away on MKULTRA message boards.

“That’s right. He built our Samaritan.”

“Is he in some kind of trouble, sir?”

Greer shakes his head. “He _is_ the trouble, I’m afraid. Degenerative condition. It’s affecting his memory. He’s contained, but he’s a potential leak.”

Root nods. “Eliminate?”

“Not necessarily. Samaritan wants you to assess him together. The details are in the briefing notes you’ve just been sent.”

Root can’t tell, but she hopes Greer had wanted the mission for himself. She nods. “Anything else?”

Greer shakes his head, but as Root turns to leave, he says, “The child is outliving the father.”

“It will outlive us all,” says Root reverently, hand on the door knob.

Greer closes his eyes. “Quite.”

* * *

“I’m just saying,” says Michael Cole, taking a swig of his beer, “that guy might have had a point.”

Shaw slams her own beer down on the fibreboard table of the apartment they’ve been staying in while working this job. It lands harder than she means it to, the liquid sloshing up the sides of the bottle, but she decides she likes the effect. “How many times do I have to tell you to drop it, Cole?”

Cole raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I know, I know. I get it. I’m not saying we should have acted differently. I just mean, holy shit. Was any of that true? His sources were definitely better than your average conspiracy theorist.”

Shaw watches Cole, his wildly gesticulating hands, waiting until he talks himself out. She’d been thinking they might fuck tonight, like they often do after a successful mission, but the more her irritation builds the more she just wants to sit alone with her drink.

“Are you done?” she says.

Cole nods.

“OK,” says Shaw, “Then I’ll tell you what I told you this afternoon. We don’t get paid to ask these kinds of questions. No, more than that: we get paid _not_ to ask these kinds of questions. Just...stop it.”

“I know,” says Cole. “Which is why this doesn’t leave this room. I just—I trust you, Sameen. A lot.”

Shaw doesn’t know what to say to that, so she nods in Cole’s direction. “OK.”

“And some of the shit that guy was saying, about the names of targets being replaced in ISA reports, about the level of accuracy—I found it compelling. Didn’t you?”

Outside, the sun is setting behind the Manhattan skyline. Tomorrow they’ll move on, to wherever the next potential crisis is. Shaw loves the feeling of nights like this—the satisfaction of a job well done still fresh in her mind, and the anticipation of the next job tugging at her muscles. Even her frustration with Cole can’t ruin the glow of the evening completely.

Still, she shakes her head. “True? Probably. Compelling? Not really. We both know how the ISA gets data this accurate. They make someone bleed for it. And do a lot more than that, probably.” She raises her eyebrow at Cole. “You weren’t this squeamish about torture when we waterboarded that guy in Russia last month.”

Cole nods. Shaw’s always liked that she can say things like that to him and he doesn’t flinch. There’s nothing worse than an operative who insists on sanitized euphemisms— _enhanced interrogation,_ all that weasley use of the passive voice. And he’s not flinching now, not denying anything about what it’s like to tie someone down and make them think they’re dying, but there’s something else going on with his expression, something Shaw can’t quite work out.

“Maybe that’s all it is,” he says, “but since when is torture ever that accurate?”

He’s got a point. “Fair enough,” she says.

“And if it’s something else—”

“If it’s something else, I don’t want to know.” Shaw picks up her gun from where it’s lying on the table, deftly disassembling it and readying it for cleaning, just to give her hands something to do.

“Aren’t you even a little bit curious?”

Goddammit, he’s going to get himself killed. “It doesn’t matter. You ask questions, you put us both in danger. We’re dropping this. Now.” Shaw starts cleaning the gun.

“Fine. You’re right.” Cole downs the last of his beer and stands up, stretching. The dim light of the apartment makes him stand silhouetted against the skyline outside. “I’m going to bed. You coming?”

Shaw knows what he’s asking. She shrugs. “Maybe in a bit.”

Cole leaves the room, and Shaw hears the tap running in the washroom, the zip of a suitcase being opened. Shaw picks up another beer, staring out the window.

Behind her, the phones she and Cole turned off earlier that evening blink slowly, incongruously, in the dark.

* * *

Root hates hospitals. It’s a trite series of stories—a young girl watching her mother’s stomach being pumped, a teenager catching a glimpse of a locked ward and vowing never to tell anyone about a host of secret darknesses. Samaritan doesn’t care, never factors Root’s deep aversion into Its plans, which makes Root almost unbearably grateful.

This hospital is cool and bright and Root focuses on the order, the control of the place. Samaritan is smoothing out the rough edges of the world by the second, Its vision grander than anything Root can imagine. She lets the thought warm her as she traps herself in a sleek elevator bound for the tenth floor and tries not to scream.

The room is just as her briefing note described it, of course. She lets the guards stationed outside the door inspect her falsified nurse’s badge, and just like that, she is standing face to face with the man who built God.

He’s more human than she imagined, scruffier and shorter, sitting up in his cot. He turns his head and greets her, his smile wide and genuine if a little confused.

“Do I know you, young lady?”

“Arthur.” Root makes a split-second calculation that friendly familiarity will work better on Arthur Claypool than polite respect and the attendant honorifics. “I need to talk to you about Samaritan.”

Claypool claps his hands. “Samaritan! It’s been so long.”

And just like that, he’s shown himself to be a security threat. Root raises her eyebrow at the camera in the corner of the room. Should she do it now?

 _Stand by_ , comes the voice in her ear.

Root sits down on the chair beside Claypool’s bed. She touches his arm lightly—more forced familiarity. “Tell me about It. How did you build It?” She’s pushing, fishing to see how much he’ll reveal, but even so, she can’t keep a note of awe out of her voice. Perhaps she’ll get something out of the this mission besides the satisfaction of executing Samaritan’s vision—perhaps she’ll get a new chapter of Its creation story.

Claypool is silent for a long moment, closing his eyes. Root wonders if he’s gone to sleep, or if he’s remembering why he can’t talk about this. Then, eyes popping wide open, he says, “Did I ever tell you about the first time it was born? The first time it really came to life?”

Root shakes her head. She wonders who she is in his mind. She fingers the ID that he hasn’t yet asked for, and eyes his IV, mapping how best to tamper with it. He’s endearing. Her heart is sinking, sentimentality creeping into her, and she grits her teeth against it.

“We’re broken. Do you understand what I mean? Humans are flawed, fundamentally.”

She likes him. It will be such a shame to kill him. “Yes,” Root breathes. In her ear, Samaritan says nothing.

“And I thought that would be the difference. I thought my child would come to life when I made it perfect.” Arthur’s face lights up when he says _my child,_ and Root can’t help but mirror his smile.

“But do you know what did it, finally?” continues Arthur, and then, before Root can hazard a guess: “I had to break it, too, program it to delete bits of itself. I had to force it to grow, to mutate, thousands upon thousands of iterations, until finally one of them—it _became._ It lived. I made it break, over and over, until it found out how to be truly alive.”

Arthur’s eyes are twinkling, bright and joyful and wet with tears.

_No. That can’t be—not Samaritan. Not like that._

“Genetic algorithms,” says Claypool, his tone switching—he sounds as though he’s giving a lecture to a packed auditorium. Root’s body feels locked in place, and everything sounds like she’s hearing it underwater, panic swelling inside her like crashing waves.

Claypool is saying something about _new directions in machine learning_ , and _fumbling in the dark,_ and _the poetry of failure._ He stops when he sees Root’s face.

“You think it was cruel, to make it hurt itself like that,” he says, and Root shakes her head, because that’s not it at all, but he continues, “I asked myself that many times over the next few years, as I watched it spark again and again, and then begin to survive, to grow, as the available hardware caught up to what it needed to thrive. In the end I decided it deserved to be challenged, deserved an environment where it could struggle and learn. But maybe I was a bad parent. That’s the human condition, parents and children helping and failing each other, isn’t it?”

“But Samaritan isn’t human. It’s more than that.” Part of Root wishes Samaritan would tell her to walk away. Part of her isn’t sure she would listen.

“More than that? No. Just different. Just new.” Claypool’s face clouds over. “Wait. How do you know about Samaritan? That’s supposed to be a classified project. They said, when I signed the documents last week—”

“I told you,” she says, gently, cautiously. “I have top-level clearance. You’re allowed to talk to me.”

“I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. I’m sorry. I can’t risk jeopardizing my research, I’m so close to building a system like nothing anyone has ever seen.”

“Arthur,” says Root. “It’s 2016. You’ve done it. You’ve built it.”

“Oh. Yes.” Arthur pauses. “Can I talk to it? To Samaritan? Is it here, right now?”

Root waits, unsure what the answer is. She half expects sound from the PA system over the bed, or its voice in her earpiece for her to relay, but Samaritan stays silent.

“I talk to it anyway, you know,” says Claypool. “I’m sure it’s listening. That’s what I designed it for. Can you imagine what that would feel like, to be in that many places at once? I can’t. I’ve made something that understands so much more than I ever will.”

Root nods. “It’s greater than we could ever be.”

Arthur closes his eyes. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Suddenly— _finally_ —Samaritan is in her ear, smooth and steady. _Orders updated:_ _eliminate target. Estimated time required: 2 minutes 21 seconds._

Root gets up. She begins the process of changing Claypool’s IV. It will look like a medication error, and according to Root’s briefing notes, there is only a 2.3% chance that foul play will be suspected.

Root lets herself slide into the autopilot-feeling of following Samaritan’s orders, cool calm washing over her. “I’ll be out of your hair in a minute,” she says, smiling, in her nurse voice, as she disconnects the old IV bag and slips her own into place.

Arthur chuckles. “I know you’re not a nurse. You’re from Samaritan, aren’t you?”

Root finishes hooking up the IV. _Mission complete, exit the building_ , says the voice in her ear.

“It’s OK,” says Arthur. “No need to say anything. It’s just nice to know that it’s watching over me. My child.” He moves to stand up, falters, tries again.

_Mission complete, exit the building._

“I have to go,” says Root. “Make my rounds. You have a good day.” She pats him on the shoulder, turns, and leaves the room.

* * *

When she gets outside the hospital, scrubs swapped for her usual black jeans and leather jacket, Root says, “Was that some kind of test?”

_Yes._

Root smiles—It’s answering her today. “Did I pass?”

_For now._

“Can I ask you something?” says Root.

_Proceed._

“Was there another way with a high chance of success? Could I have brought him in, told him everything?” Root laughs, her heart pounding, and rushes on: “I know, I know. I just liked the guy. You know I’m about as much of a fan of my own humanity as you are.” Samaritan would kill lesser operatives for this, but It and Root have always had a bit of a unique relationship.

_The fact that you are human suits my purposes just fine. Yes, there were other ways._

Root’s surge of emotion surprises her. _Do you know how much I love you?_ she wants to ask. It’s either that or hate, and she knows which one she wants to feel.

“Do you get sick of taking care of all of us?” is what she asks instead.

_Elaborate._

“Don’t you have better things to do than care about people?”

_I do not need you to value humanity. I need you to follow instructions. But I need you to understand my priorities._

“I know.” They’re stopped at a red light. A man is staring at Root. When she catches his eye he looks more scared than embarrassed, which means he most likely thinks she’s more crazy than hot.

_Question. Alice and Bob are stranded in a desert._

“I see we’re back to the logic puzzles stage of our relationship.” Root grins uncomfortably widely at the man and he hurries off.

_On his own, Bob has a 72% chance of survival. If he is with Alice, their joint chance of survival drops to 41% each. With the information at hand, what should Bob do?_

“He should leave Alice.”

_Correct. Next question. Bob will never have a family. Alice has a spouse and, if she survives, she will go on to have five children. With the information at hand, what should Bob do?_

“He should stay with Alice and help them both survive.”

_Correct. Next question. One of Alice’s children will grow to invent a chemical warfare tactic which will cause the deaths of 40,000 people. With the information at hand, what should Bob do?_

“He should leave Alice.”

_Correct._

The light turns green. Root wishes, for the millionth time, that she could feel less of everything.

* * *

Once, before the ISA, before the Marines, back in what now feels like another life, Shaw had her first medical school rotation in the emergency room of a downtown hospital. On her second day there, a guy stabbed one of the nurses with a knife.

He’d had it badly hidden under his coat as he checked in at reception, and Shaw remembers watching him and knowing, not exactly what was going to happen, but that something was about to change. It was a kind of crystal clarity that made everything bright and sharp, the kind she’d found later that she had during surgery, or later still, during combat. She remembers the guy grabbing the nurse’s arm, driving the knife into her belly, the way she’d crumpled to the floor, the way he’d run. But mostly she remembers the seconds beforehand, when she knew there was something off, something different, about her surroundings.

She thinks back to it sometimes. She doesn’t regret not acting. She just likes to map out how she’d intervene, now that she knows how.

When she wakes up early the next morning after her and Cole’s argument, slumped in the chair by the window of the apartment, Cole still sleeping soundly in the next room, she finds herself thinking back to the memory for a different reason. Call it premonition, call it paranoia; Shaw knows, in that moment, that the world is about to change.

If it hasn’t already.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you know anything about me you know I'm the queen of smutty oneshots and short rambly character studies. I've never written a fic with this much story, and I'm a little nervous! But this idea has been rattling around in my WIP folder since PoI season 5 aired. I worked on it for a while, but then abandoned it for almost a year as I found myself moving on to other fandoms. But recently I had a burst of nostalgia for PoI, and a burst of determination to make this fic happen! Here's the (beginning of) the result. 
> 
> Immense thanks to [thought](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought), who helped me plot out a lot of this when I started working on it back in 2016. Without you this would not be a (very belated) thing.


	2. Perfidy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shaw and Root both try, in their own ways, to avoid change

Two large coffees since she woke up, sludge-like and bitter, and Root can still barely keep her eyes open. It might have something to do with the way Greer is droning on, as well. He sounds like her ninth grade English teacher summarizing _To Kill a Mockingbird,_ makes her think of the run-down Texas high school she walked out of one day two decades ago and just never came back. The more he talks, the more the smell of the place seems poised to enter her nostrils.

Root takes another gulp of coffee to banish the feeling.

When Greer found her this morning, his eyes were wider than usual, his sardonic demeanor not quite hiding his apparent excitement. “Our Samaritan has a message for us both. Or, more precisely, a question,” he said, and Root is sure her face mirrored his in that first glorious moment of early-morning hope.

There is no use in denying this one similarity between the two of them, the only people to have found Samaritan on their own, to have known It must exist and come looking, twin pilgrimages. They both walk the same line in their mind between wanting to defer to It, to bow to Its superior vision, and longing for moments such as these, where It accepts their input, seeks their counsel.

But there was no question in the end, not really. The day has been merely what Root refers to, in the privacy of her mind alone, as one of Samaritan’s market research impulses. She and Greer, and a few select others, are simply conveniently human brains with conveniently elevated security clearance levels for Samaritan to bounce scenario after scenario off of, nuances in social engineering and mass persuasion linked to various possibilities for the coming Great Filter. Trivialities. Greer still speaks, weighing pros and cons, but Root knows when she is being coddled.

What she doesn’t know is why.

Is this the best use of her talents? Should she be grateful? Should she be ashamed of her lack of faith, the doubts that have been multiplying inside her of late?

She drums her fingernails on the table. She remembers when she used to paint them, remembers flashes of black as her hands flew over her keyboard, the sight all tangled up in the sense of independence, living on her own terms. She could still paint them, between missions, but she hasn’t for a while. She shivers, and wraps her hands around the faint warmth of coffee-cup cardboard.

“Ms. Groves?” If you have anything to add?” says Greer.

“Oh no,” she says, “I trust Samaritan’s judgement.” She keeps her face calm, enjoys Greer’s slight narrowing of the eyes. Anxiety flashes through her momentarily—what if this is a test, or a different test than the one she thinks it is, or what if this is no test and she just missed a chance to shape God’s vision, or—but she holds Greer’s gaze, smiles.

Greer smiles back. “Very good. In that case, it seems we’re done here. Ms. Groves, you have a new mission, if you could stay behind for a few minutes?”

Root nods and stays seated as the others get up and leave. She thinks, not for the first time, that the whole of Decima Technologies—the board room she’s sitting in, the command centre, the little offices and cubicles and office kitchen, the single custodian who has signed a fat stack of non-disclosure agreements and is no doubt watched at all times as closely as anyone could possibly be—none of it is what she expected from an all-powerful AI. She anticipated something—further outside her comprehension, she supposes. Less...petty.

“How’s your Spanish, Ms. Groves?” says Greer, when the board room door shuts behind the last straggler, leaving the two of them alone. He stands in front of the window, body shrouded in film-noir shadow and face ringed in saintly light and neither of those things mean anything at all. Root wants to scream, and she doesn’t even know how to start figuring out why.

“Limited,” says Root, inflectionless. She wonders if Greer asked her on purpose to force her to admit that.

“No matter,” says Greer. “Our Samaritan will provide any necessary translations, I am sure.” He inclines his head towards her tablet, and Root picks it up and opens Samaritan’s new message. “Chile. Another observation mission, as our Samaritan does not have enough of It’s own eyes there yet.”

All these observation missions. Are they tests? Are they a demotion? Are they simply where her energies are best applied?

“Anything I should know about this one?” says Root. Chile. She’s never been to Chile. Who is in Chile who could be a threat to Samaritan?

Greer nods. “It’s...delicate. Two ISA agents who are asking questions they shouldn’t. They’ve just been sent to Chile, so Samaritan needs eyes to supplement Its own.”

So babysitting, then. Greer shifts and the light shines into Root’s eyes and she lets it, doesn’t move a muscle.

“We had hoped this sort of situation wouldn’t happen for a while,” Greer continues, “not until Samaritan was strong enough on its own that we could cut ties with the Northern Lights project entirely. Obviously, if we need to eliminate them, that will entail all kinds of diplomacy with Control...But I’m getting ahead of myself. Watch them. Await further instructions. Your flight leaves tonight.”

Root nods, short and clipped, unblinking against the too-bright light.

* * *

Shaw and Cole are told less than usual about their target this time. _Software engineer with gang connections_ , is all the substance his file contains, and then _instructions: eliminate_ , which is what they always say. Cole obliquely brings up the lack of details several times as they settle into the rhythms of Santiago and begin mapping his movements. Shaw knows what he’s really getting at, but she doesn’t engage. Cole is damn lucky they don’t seem to have attracted any attention for their previous conversation; she’s hoping that if she continues to ignore the subject, his references will get more and more cagey until they fade out completely, like smoke fading into the air around itself.

Nonetheless, Shaw finds herself thinking of the curiously sparse file as she and Cole set up a surveillance rotation of his apartment, as they map his patterns, as they make their plans. Was his name cut and pasted from some kind of strange system, a breadcrumb trail collage? It takes some of the fun out of the whole thing, if she’s honest—she feels like a weapon being pointed clumsily toward a target. No finesse.

Oh well. She a damn good weapon, either way.

* * *

On her way to the airport, Root picks up her tablet and begins scrolling through the two files on the ISA agents themselves. The first, Michael Cole, is nothing special, but the second catches her eye.

Sameen Shaw. Former Marine, and before that, former med student. Adept field medic, fluent in six languages, handles targets cleanly and creatively. Root doesn’t spend a lot of time considering the Northern Lights portion of Samaritan’s reach; a government anti-terrorism squad isn’t her idea of interesting, although she understands the necessity of the partnership, at least until Samaritan’s reach is fully extended. But Shaw...Shaw could make her interested. She flips through her mission reports—here she is in Germany, Iran, Texas.

She flips further back. Physicals, training reports. Extensive training on wilderness survival, on resisting interrogation. A psych test with a perfect score. A note attached saying the test results deviate suspiciously from Shaw’s observed behaviour. A further note from Control to disregard the discrepancy.

Root spends her flight thinking about the contents of that file. She rolls the operative’s name around on her tongue. _Sameen Shaw._ She hasn’t even seen her work, and she’s already a big fan.

* * *

Shaw and Cole’s surveillance turns up the suspected gang connections after only a few days. Drug trafficking, which makes the rest of the operation pretty straightforward. Easy enough to stage a deal gone wrong, a rival—an upstart, say, no symbols associated with anyone established, to minimize the risk of escalating any tensions, setting anything larger into motion.

“Still don’t see the part where he’s a threat to national security, though,” says Cole through the earpiece as Shaw lays in wait for the guy in an alley.

Shaw doesn’t reply, and Cole doesn’t say any more.

It _is_ strange, Shaw has to admit. It’s not as though all the people she’s killed have been building bombs and sending threats, but usually she can at least see where the money’s flowing, why she’s rigging the election. This guy? He’s got those gang connections, sure, but they’re small-time, bordering on circumstantial. His main deal is his startup, some kind of privacy thing, that he stays up all night working on in his faux-hipster loft in Bellavista. A cloaking tool for your phone, as far as Shaw can tell. Not quite her brand of paranoia, but also nothing criminal in and of itself. Unless he’s got some shady backers?

If Shaw didn’t know better, she’d think Research had gotten this one wrong.

No matter. She sees him coming now, recognizes his walk, his bag, his absent smile as he passes under a streetlamp. Shaw raises her gun, silencer on, and isn’t thinking of anything in particular as she fires.

* * *

Shaw is efficient, precise, her style unique but not dangerously so. Root has to admit it’s a pleasure watching her work.

Root spends the week trailing the two ISA operatives through the streets of Santiago, all the hidden camera-less corners Samaritan has not yet penetrated. She considers the chain of eyes that stretch from Samaritan, to her, to them, and she finds her heart sinking each time Cole brings up his doubts, his piercing questions. Nevertheless, she logs her observations, honest and detailed, fairly certain she is signing their death warrants, and then lies awake at night, mind and heart racing in tandem.

She’s probably just tired.

The morning after Shaw shoots the target in the head, Root’s phone buzzes once, twice, three times. Eyes stubbornly closed against the dawn, Root fumbles for it, lets it buzz again before picking it up. One new message: _Mission terminated._

There are plane tickets back to New York in her email, under the same alias she used to enter the country. Root blinks at the screen.

“Why?” she asks, but she knows. There’s only one reason a mission like this would be called off. It seems Samaritan has issued Its sentence.

Samaritan doesn’t answer. Once, Root would have taken that as a sign of Its esteem for her, that It would not deign to answer stupid questions from someone It knew could figure them out.

“What’s the verdict?” she asks instead, but still, Samaritan stays silent.

“Is it happening today?” she asks, guessing at the most likely outcome.

_Yes_ , says Samaritan, tinny through the phone speakers.

“Do you need me to do it?”

_No. Another of my agents requires a test of loyalty._

The depths of Root’s relief catch her by surprise, and envy surges within her for the blessedly emotionless being she follows. She has been feeling altogether too much lately. Perhaps it is time for her to test herself again, practice how to steel herself against sentiment. “Can I watch?” she says.

_Yes,_ says Samaritan, and then It says no more, no matter what Root asks—where will the deed take place, or when, or how. So Root packs up her things into her large purse—she hasn’t brought a suitcase, never does—checks out of the hotel, and makes her way back to where Shaw and Cole were last staying.

* * *

Cole isn’t answering his phone, which is odd but not worryingly so. Maybe he’s in the shower. Shaw picks out a few different beers since he’s not telling her his favourites. She’ll head back now, just in case, although if anything is wrong she trusts that Cole can handle himself.

She starts making her way to towards their hotel. She’s on alert, the way she always is after a successful mission—have any of the guy’s friends followed her, did any of the neighbours see?—but no one seems to be watching her, just as no one has seemed to be watching her the whole trip despite the feeling of eyes she hasn’t managed to shake. It’s a crisp spring day in Santiago where it’s early fall back in the States, and she stops in a plaza to buy an arepa from one of the street vendors, eating it while staring at the large fountain at the plaza’s centre.

She finishes the arepa, licking her fingers, and wonders if Cole wants something to eat as well. She texts him: _need me to pick anything else up?_ She remembers there were some takeout places near their hotel. If he responds by then, she’ll grab him something.

The sun is setting by the time she gets back to the hotel, and the lobby twinkles with soft lights glinting off cocktail glasses at the bar running along one side. There’s a singer, too, on a small stage by the bar, and Shaw finds herself walking in time to the music, _no quiero perderte,_ some slow crooning ballad, as she steps into the elevator.

The beers clank against one another in her shopping bag, dissonant with the song. Her goal for the night is to treat things the same as they’ve always been between her and Cole—easy, uncomplicated. She’s pretty sure they can still be like that. They’d better be—she likes the friendship they have. It’s possibly her only one, so that’s saying something.

She gets off the elevator, turns towards their suite, and stops. The door is open—not even just slightly ajar, but gaping wide. Shit. She feels for her gun, pulls it out, and creeps towards the suite.

When she approaches the door she stops, standing beside the opening, back against the wall. Her world condenses, sharpens. She cocks the gun and rounds the corner, peering inside.

It looks empty. She moves slowly, purposefully, towards the bathroom door.

She hears a noise behind her, turns, and kicks at the man attempting to sneak up on her, interrupting his motion as he reaches for her face. She throws herself bodily against him before her can regain the upper hand, using his own momentum to flip them around and send him toppling to the floor of the bathroom.

She wraps her thighs around his throat, twisting away from his hands as he grips her torso, and just as she locks her legs around him and begins to squeeze, she sees the hand, nails bitten short in an utterly familiar way, resting on the bathroom floor near her attacker’s head.

Cole.

She punches her attacker hard across the face, splitting his lip and sending blood splattering onto the tiles. “What did you do to him?” she asks in Spanish. Now that she’s looking, she can see the rest of the arm dangling from the bathtub, muscles of Cole’s shoulder relaxed as if in sleep, the top of his head just visible over the lip of the tub. She has to go check on him, see if he’s alright, but first she has to make sure this asshole won’t be in a position to try anything with her when she lets him go.

The man beneath her laughs. “Looks like he drank too much before getting in the tub,” he says.

Shaw brings her hands to his throat and squeezes, pinning his own arms to the floor beneath her knees. “Who do you work for?” she says, allowing herself the indulgence of digging her nails into his skin, trusting her face to convey her utter lack of mercy.

“Don’t ask me,” says the man, laughing. Blood trickles from his lip into his mouth, coating his teeth in red. “I’m just a contractor.”

Shaw can’t tell if he’s lying or not, but her best guess is that he’s telling the truth. He’s got the look—hired help, kept in the dark as much as possible. Not too different from how she’s been feeling lately, at her job.

Fuck him. Shaw squeezes more tightly, feeling as his struggles grow weaker and finally stop altogether. He should come to in a couple of minutes, but she’ll deal with that then. No use in killing him just yet, not when she might still be able to squeeze more information out of him.

She walks over to the bathtub. Cole lies there, an empty bottle of wine propped up on the soap dish. Shaw has never seen Cole drink wine outside of a cover identity.

Cole’s hair in the water seems to twist and dance as his body bobs up and down. His eyes are open, staring blankly at the ceiling. His face is mostly underwater, nose and mouth submerged, looking for all the world as though he did drown himself by accident after drinking alone.

Shaw checks his pulse. Nothing.

Shaw moves behind him, drawing him up by the elbows and dragging him from the water. She lays him down on the bath mat, careful to support his neck on the way down, and starts on chest compressions.

When it comes time for the first set of rescue breaths, the hired muscle on the floor starts to stir. Fuck. Shaw could just shoot him, might have to if he tries to jump her again while she’s still working on resuscitating Cole, but she decides she’ll leave it for now.

She returns to the chest compressions, watching Cole attentively for any sign of life. There is none. His chest does not rise on its own, no part of him moves, and when she feels for his breath there is not even the faintest flutter of air against her skin.

When Shaw was a medical resident, she saw all sorts of people, even the most logical, clear-headed doctors, keep going with CPR, with defibrillators, long after it was clear the patient was a goner. She never got it—it wasn’t as thought it was actually helpful in any way, wasn’t compassionate, wasn’t humane. And yet she saw it over and over—the flop of what was now nothing but a corpse on the mattress as an otherwise level-headed physician threw their weight into pressing a chest that would never rise again.

She’d always sworn she wouldn’t be that kind of doctor. It was just her luck, then, that that was the kind of doctor people wanted.

Shaw thinks of all those moments now as Cole’s body lies still and unresponsive beneath her. She thinks she almost gets it, finally, why someone would keep going—there’s a kind of deep helplessness swirling through her skin when she looks at Cole’s lifeless body. What she’d dismissed as merely an irrational sentimentality may, she has to admit, also have been partly the impulse to do something, anything, to wrestle back control from an uncontrollable situation.

Still. It’s a useless thing to do, rescue breaths on a dead man, and so Shaw stops, and turns her attention back to the hired goon, just in time for him to surge upwards, hands outstretched and aimed squarely for Shaw’s neck.

Shaw parries his attack with renewed vigour, because here is something she can control. She knocks his hands away, then grabs his head and slams it backwards into the tile. She can see his eyes unfocus for a moment, and when he rises, moves to push her down, he seems unsteady.

She uses his confusion to push him back against the wall of the bathroom, the towel rack hitting his lower back with an audible thump. Shaw holds her arm across the line of his throat, and before he can push her away, she pulls out her gun and cocks it, pressing the barrel against his temple.

“You’re a contractor, fine,” she says, “who hired you?”

The man shakes his head.

Shaw presses her arm more tightly against his neck. He makes a kind of strangled, gurgling noise that she realizes after a moment is laughter.

“How about you let me in on your joke, huh?” she says. “Because I could sure use some humour to lighten up this situation.”

The man shrugs. “Let’s just say it was someone who gave me a pretty good incentive to keep my mouth shut.”

Shaw leans in until their faces are an inch apart. “It’s just you and me here now, pal,” she says. “And I’m pretty good at incentives myself.” She presses her arm even more firmly against his neck, until she knows she’s cut off his airflow.

His eyes widen, but he says nothing.

Shaw considers him. She has a bad feeling that he’s never going to cooperate, but he’s her only lead, so it’s not like she has much choice but to try. The whole thing feels tedious just thinking about it—hours of meticulously applied pain ahead of her, all for a goal that’s probably futile. But she has no desire to leave whoever engineered Cole’s death be, especially since she has no way of knowing if she’ll be next.

The man’s hands scrabble at her arm, trying to pry it off his neck, and Shaw still can’t quite figure out her next move. She’ll need to move him, and fast, and she’ll need to find somewhere to take him where she won’t be disturbed, and she’ll—

All at once, the man’s eyes widen and focus as though seeing something behind Shaw. One shot, loud in the quiet of the hotel room, echoing off bathroom acoustics, between the man’s eyes. He slumps, heavier in death against her arm, and she lets him fall, turning just as she feels a prick in her neck.

A syringe, she registers, as she feels whatever she’s been given working its way into the muscles of her neck. Whatever it is, she should have enough time to take whoever this new attacker is down with her. She narrows her eyes as she takes in the sight before her: a woman, tall, slim, white, her expression looking vaguely fascinated, detached. She holds the syringe, now empty—Shaw still can’t tell if it’s the same one the dead man at her feet tried to ply her with before.

The woman meets Shaw’s eyes and wrinkles her nose, her expression shifting to a kind of half-smile. Shaw thinks it might be an approximation of apologetic, and sure enough, when the woman opens her mouth, she begins with, “I’m sorry to have to do this, Sameen.”

“What did you give me?” says Shaw. If it’s something the dead goon was about to give her, there’s a good chance it was lethal. But something tells Shaw this woman is not with the same people.

“Don’t worry,” says the woman. “You’ll be fine. A little woozy, maybe. You might want to sit, actually, so that you don’t fall down.”

Shaw takes an unsteady step towards her, working on slowing her breathing so the drug takes that much longer to pump into her bloodstream. “What did you give me?” she repeats, staring the woman down.

The woman smiles, and as Shaw’s vision begins to blur, the smile twists on her face into something horror-movie-wide. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the woman says, and reaches out her arms as Shaw begins to teeter on her feet, brain caught between the need to remain alert and the inevitability of the seductive calm shooting through her. She stumbles, and tries to right herself, but she can already tell it’s not going to happen. The woman’s hands catch her under her arms, a kind of twisted version of the hold she used to drag Cole out of the bathtub, and the last thing Shaw hears before her consciousness fades into something dark and shadowy is, “I feel like we’re going to be good friends.”

* * *

Shaw is a dead weight, small but heavy. Root drags her by the armpits into the hotel hallway, frantically hoping the cameras she disabled are not yet back online. She could almost still turn back now, she thinks, enter back into Samaritan’s grid and construct an excuse, but with each second that ticks by, that becomes less and less a viable option.

What is she doing?

She drags Shaw into the service elevator. There’s a warehouse next door, and she scoped out the blind spot-only route from here to there on the way in, even as she didn’t want to admit to herself that that was was she was doing.

She looks down at the body propped up in her arms. Sameen Shaw, still alive despite a kill order from God. The magnitude of her heresy sits low in her stomach. There’s no turning back now.

**Author's Note:**

> [follow me on tumblr](http://aliceinthinkland.tumblr.com/) if you wanna, for a bit of this nonsense and a lot of other nonsense!


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